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Sunday, 27 February 2011

In defense of marriage

This is not about the United States statutes which constitute the law known as DOMA, recently called into question by the President's refusal, with his Attorney General, to defend it in court. This is about the reality.

I've been reading Aryeh Kaplan's wedding guidebook called Made in Heaven, as quite soon The Husband and I will bring Yeshiva Son to the chupah, B"H. It's an amazing book, so amazing in fact that I'm typing out a couple of pages (pp. 2- 5) here so that you can share in some of its wisdom.

Whenever a person meets the special "one," it is something of a miracle. Somehow, through a particular set of coincidences and chains of events, Gd has brought them together. It is a miracle that will bring happiness to the couple, and in a sense, begin the creation of a new world.

In addition to the factors that brought the couple together, there are also the factors that brought them into existence. These factors also trace their beginnings all the way back to creation. Pondering this, we see every marriage a being initiated at the very beginning of time. Thus, every marriage is like a crossroads in eternity.

Consider for a moment the ancestry of the boy and girl. Each one obviously has two partents... four grandparents... eight great-grandparents... 16 great-great-grandparents, and 32 great-great-great-grandparents.

The calculations then become a bit more difficult... But the results are fascinating. A few minutes with a pocket calculator, and it becomes obvious that going back ten generations, a person has 1,024 ancestors. Back twenty generations, he has 1,048,576 -- over a million!

After this, the numbers become almost absurd. After thirty generations the number of one's ancestors would be ... over a billion. After forty generations, it would be 1,099,511,627,776 -- over a trillion!

This last number is obviously absurd. It is greater than the total number of people who have ever lived. No one can have more ancestors than there are people. This number simply means that the ancestral lines cross....

In any case, it takes fewer than forty generations for a person to find a number of ancestors that is greater than the total population of the world. But forty generations is not an impossibly long time. If we consider the average generation to be around 25 years, forty generations is only one thousand years.

This is a fascinating point. If we trace a single person's ancetry back for a thousand years (actually, much less), we find that he can possibly be descended from every human being alive at the time.

To put it another way, it took [one thousand years and] the entire world population of one thousand years ago to provide the unique ingredients of heredity and environment that produced the unique individual as he is today....

... if one could look at the world of a thousand years ago, every person one saw would most probably be an ancestor of the young man or woman standing here today. Every marriage that took place one thousand years ago would have led to this unique person as he is today. If one man in the past had married one woman instead of another, his children would have been different. This, in turn, would have affected all subsequent generations -- to this very day.

This has awesome implications. A single marriage one thousand years ago could have changed every single person alive today. A marriage is therefore an event of tremendous consequence. It is a miraculous event in more ways than one.

Now let us assume that our boy and girl marry. Assume that they have a "small" family of only two children. And assume that each of their descendants also has a similar family, averaging two children.

We again see that the number of descendants doubles in each generation.... [such that] after ten generations this couple has 1024 descendants.... And after only 24 generations -- a mere 600 years -- there will be 16,777,216 descendants. This is very close to the current world Jewish population.

Thus, when a couple decides to marry, it is much more than a personal decision....

.... The Torah tells us that Adam was a single individual. Yet, all the billions of people alive today are descendants of Adam and Eve. Every couple who marries is just like Adam and Eve. In the course of time, their descendants will number in the millions, forming a huge population.

It is obvious that if Gd is concerned with the destiny of even the most insignificant individual, then He is all the more concerned with the population of the entire world. But every marriage can, in time, produce an entire world population. Creating a marriage is therefore just like creating an entire world.

Comments

I was born in 1945, on my grandfather's 70th birthday. In 1965, we gathered to celebrate his 90th birthday. His children, now senior citizens themselves, asked him to address the over 200 relatives gathered for the occasion. My grandfather stood, and smiled as he looked at his children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. "As I look around", he said, "it is with astonishment that I realize that I am directly responsible for more than 85% of you being born." He paused, and then said, "I believe that it has all been to the good, as you have all filled me with joy." He then sat down, having said all that was needed.

Tom - you may recall my writing a few weeks ago about the watering-down of that venerable word "awesome." Well, the occasion you describe cannot, I think, be described with any other single English word -- unless perhaps it's "blessed." Thanks for reminding all of us why, on the sixth day, God looked at His creation and "found it very good."